


The Death of a Child

by draculard



Category: The Woman in Black - Susan Hill
Genre: Body Horror, Childhood Sexual Abuse, Extreme Underage, F/M, Ghost Sex, Rape/Non-con Elements, referenced child death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-26 09:47:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20740223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: Arthur was a mere boy when his family traveled to Eel Marsh House.





	The Death of a Child

Arthur was a mere boy when his family traveled to Eel Marsh House. He sat in the back of the cart with a rough blanket folded beneath him and another one, just as coarse, over his lap. It was cold on the journey, but Arthur kept his hands free, allowing them to freeze so he could play with the little wooden horse and soldier his father had carved him.

His mother warned him not to drop them, and he didn’t, no matter how much the cart bumped as the horse wound its way over the country roads. 

They passed many a graveyard on their way. The stones were gray and worn down by the weather, marked with the dark spots of a light rain. Arthur felt the raindrops coming down on his shoulders and hair, cold water hitting his scalp, but did nothing to shield himself, and his parents took no notice. At the front of the cart, his mother unsheathed an umbrella and held it over herself, but not over Arthur’s father.

The drizzle stopped soon enough, anyway. 

He had hoped there would be other children here  — friends to make and play with, guides to introduce him to the secret places children always find together amongst marshes and woods  — but it became clear early on that there would be none. They had left civilization behind an hour ago; the last house they’d seen was in fact nothing more than an abandoned gardening shed. 

He would have no one here but his toys.

* * *

The nursery door was stuck fast — _perhaps locked,_ Arthur’s father mused — so his mother scooped him up off the floor and carried him through the halls, peeking in through every doorway until she found a room suitable for a child. Arthur held still in her arms, holding his wooden toys carefully as they inspected the rooms. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he studied each one carefully all the same, noting the high windows (he’d never be able to see out of them), the uncomfortable furniture, the stiff-looking decorations which might be broken were he to spend any time close to them. 

In the end, his mother carried him up the rickety stairs to the musty attic. Dust motes hung in the air, visible in the thin light from a dirt-streaked window, and Arthur held his breath, worried that if he drew those motes into his lungs, he’d choke.

Mother set him gently on the floor and crossed the room to a small aluminum bed frame. 

“Strange,” she said, talking to herself rather than to him. “With a nursery downstairs, you wouldn’t think…”

She glanced over her shoulder and caught Arthur staring at her, his eyes big and dark.

“Well,” she said, amending whatever unfinished thought she’d had, “perhaps the door’s been stuck for longer than we suspected.”

Arthur nodded, though he didn’t quite understand what she meant. He walked to her side, staring at the small footprints he left in the dust on the floorboards, listening to the way they creaked and sagged beneath his informidable weight. Mother ran her hand over one of the bed posts; it ended in an unpolished bulb. 

Across from the bed frame, nearly hidden by what must have been nearly a century of clutter and old cartons and musty clothes, was a wooden cupboard equipped with a streaked mirror, coat hooks, and three drawers, all of them missing handles. Mother carefully moved the various heavy cartons out of the way, sliding them farther into the corner, and then knelt before the cupboard.

She wedged her fingers into the cracks between the drawers, easing each one open bit by bit. As Arthur watched, she removed them entirely and turned them upside down, shaking free the accumulation of mouse droppings and dust bunnies inside. 

“These will do, I think,” she said. She replaced the drawers, making sure to leave each one open by at least an inch so that Arthur could slide them out again. She clapped her hands against her skirt, leaving lines of dirt on the fabric, and went back to him, briefly clasping his hand. “We’ll find you a mattress in town,” she said. “Unless you’d prefer to sleep on the frame?”

Faintly, Arthur smiled, but only because she was smiling, too, and he figured she must have been joking. 

“You’ll like it here?” Mother asked, her own smile dropping.

“Yes,” said Arthur. He was thinking of the cartons, and of the hours he might spend searching through them to uncover mysteries. Perhaps there had been children here, once. Perhaps he might find some new toys.

“Yes,” Mother repeated absently, squeezing his hand. “I think I shall enjoy it, too.”

* * *

There were no toys in the old, soggy cartons, but there was an abundance of mold. The smell of it, once released, invaded Arthur’s nostrils and made his head spin. He stumbled to the little round window near his bed and grappled at the edges, looking for some way to open it  — but there was no clasp, no hinges, no way to open it at all.

He coughed into his sleeve, abandoned his efforts, and hurried down the stairs and out the front door, not thinking to grab his coat. Outside, the sky was grey and the air was thick with what might have been either mist or a light rain. The cool, strange, damp scent of it replaced the clot of mold which seemed stuck in his lungs.

Arthur didn’t find it to be an improvement.

With nowhere else to go, he paced the overgrown lawn, absorbing water from the blades of grass into his poorly-made shoes. Cordgrass and glasswort caught on his clothes and brushed lightly against his fingers as he walked, making him snatch his hands back and examine them, certain each time that what he felt must have been some sort of insect or arachnid crawling on his skin. 

He circled back toward Eel Marsh House and saw, for the first time, the fat black spiders lining the walls, hanging in cobwebs strung between untrimmed bushes and tall weeds. He turned back, heart thumping, and walked instead toward the woods which lined the property, made up of wetland trees. 

He walked silently and for a long time, keeping his eyes on the unhealthy-looking brown leaves, trying to remember which ones he’d seen in his father’s wildlife guides. Trying not to think of the mold in the cartons upstairs or the spiders guarding the old house. He spotted bald cypress, ash, and oak trees lining what could be generously described as a path through the woods  — in reality, it was just a winding, narrow gap between the trees where the brambles weren’t quite thick enough to bar passage. 

The fog was thick and low here, Arthur noticed. He held his hands ahead of him, catching cobwebs before they could hit his face, hoping to watch the opaque mist swallow his fingers whole. It didn’t happen. Each time he took a step closer to the fog, it seemed to recede farther into the woods, revealing trees he hadn’t seen a moment previous, and sinks he might have walked right into if he hadn’t paid attention.

And then, suddenly, Arthur was in a clearing, and the clearing was lined with strangely-shaped stones. They weren’t lined up in rows, but they were close to it. They were different sizes and shapes, each of them eroded by years of damp weather. Some were standing at precarious angles; others had fallen and were wedged firmly in the earth, five or more inches of them swallowed up by the ground.

It was only when Arthur lay his small hand against one of the stones and dug his fingernails into a lichen-covered date engraved into the surface that he realized he was standing in a graveyard. His breath caught; his vision sharpened, made clearer by a sudden, superstitious surge of fear. He’d never been in a graveyard before; there was one near his parents’ home, and he’d stared at it fearfully every time they passed by, but he’d never gone inside. Even when the other boys dared him to approach it, they only required that he touched the gate.

He closed his eyes and forced himself to take a breath. When he opened them again, he focused all his attention on the engraved date. He traced it as best he could, struggling to make out each number. 

1842-1849.

Arthur’s mind raced, double-checking the numbers as he calculated the dead child’s age. Only seven years old  — the same age as him! He knew, of course, that children died from illness or in accidents, but he’d never seen evidence of it before. He’d only heard of it in stories. He moved his hand up to the dead child’s name, struggling to make it out. 

It was a long moment before he realized the three letters did not spell a name. The child had been buried anonymously, under the singular label, SON.

Was that how he would be buried, if he were to die today? Not as Arthur, but as some unnamed son, defined only by the fact that he had a father to pay for his grave marker? He traced the words again, disbelieving  — did seven years of life and personality count for nothing? He had memories of things neither of his parents would ever know about. Adventures and dares he’d taken, friends he’d made whom they’d never met. He had knowledge of things they didn’t  — the mold in the cartons upstairs, the window that wouldn’t open, the location of this little graveyard, most recently. 

It seemed unfathomable to him, and unjust, that anyone should be buried without a name. It was if the buried boy had never had a life or mind of his own.

Arthur turned away from the grave, finally unable to bear the sight of it for a second longer, and that was when he saw the woman standing on the other side of the plot.

_ There’s something wrong with her face,  _ Arthur thought. There was something dreadfully wrong with it. It was like she was wearing a domino mask, like the harlequin illustrations in Arthur’s nursery rhyme book, but she was  _ nothing _ like those impish dancing figures, and the closer he looked at her, the more his mind screamed at him to look away.

It wasn’t a domino mask at all, he realized. It was just the skin around her eyes and over her nose. It had blackened somehow, turned hard and thin and leathery. 

Like the frog he’d found on the road one summer, baked and mummified by the sun.

She stared back at him, her eyes strangely difficult to pin down  — and then Arthur realized there were no eyes anymore, only an off-white, gummy substance melted in the pits of her sockets, looking almost like an extra ridge of bone.

He could smell her. God, he could smell her from here, rancid and choking, overwhelming, dank.

_ She’s dead, _ he thought, and he felt daft for not realizing earlier, but he’d never met a dead woman before, and he’d certainly never seen or heard of one who could stand upright. He shrank back, his back against the gravestone that said only SON, 1842-1849. 

He closed his eyes. He tried not to breathe in that awful smell.

When he opened his eyes, she was gone.

* * *

The chairs at the dinner table were too large for Arthur; he had no other recourse but to sit on his knees with his legs folded beneath him in order to reach his plate. Mother gave the house a cursory search for a cushion for him to use, but she came up empty-handed, and Arthur preferred to sit this way anyway. It made him feel wicked.

_ I saw a woman, _ he thought as he speared a cold sliver of potato with his fork. He raised the potato to his mouth, grimaced as he ate it, and found he couldn’t force himself to say the words aloud.

Why was he keeping mum? He thought of a myriad of excuses, none of them very good. 

_ They won’t believe you. They’ll think you’re making it up or imagining it because of those ghost stories Mother tells at bedtime. _

Or, worse:

_ They will believe you, and it will scare them worse than it scared you. _

Arthur eyed his parents, silently judging their strength of character, their composure, their stiff upper lips. He remembered how Father had jumped up on the table earlier today when a mouse had scurried across the floor. 

No, best not to tell them. He chased another cold potato around his plate; Mother had seasoned it with thyme, basil, and chives, and he hated the wet little leaves plastered against the dead white flesh of the potato. It seemed unnatural. They looked like a dozen rotten pits.

“Eat your vegetables, Arthur,” Father said.

“I already ate one.”

Father didn’t dignify that with a response. He leveled Arthur with a dark, meaningful look, and Arthur scowled as he scooped the potatoes into his mouth one by one. Outside, the wind battered at the old house, shrieking past the shutters and drifting into the hallway from cracks in the foundation. Rain tapped against the sides of the house and shattered across the windows.

He hoped the attic didn’t leak. His new mattress was leaning against the wall upstairs, next to the stairs which led to his room. Mother expected him to carry it up himself, and Arthur had only nodded gravely at her request, afraid to argue back. He didn’t want to admit that the mattress looked too heavy for him. It was stuffed full with straw, and was taller and wider than he was. He couldn’t imagine climbing up the steep steps with it tucked under his arm or loaded over his back.

“Perhaps tomorrow,” said Mother, “we can take you down to the village, Arthur, and you can find some new playmates.”

He chewed a mouthful of potatoes solemnly and thought it over. The prospect of new friends did not thrill him, exactly  — he was a solitary boy. But new friends would likely have unfamiliar toys to share with Arthur during their playmates, and  _ that _ prospect pleased him very much.

“I shall bring my horse and soldier,” he declared before he had quite finished chewing. The toys in question were lined up on his chair, hidden from his parents’ sight beneath the table, as he wasn’t allowed to bring them to dinner. He touched them furtively, reassuring himself that they were still there.

_ I met a woman in the woods today,  _ he thought.

Aloud, he said, “I’m finished, Mother. May I be excused?”

* * *

“Do you walk the causeway?”

Arthur shook his head. His new playmate, a boy named Edgar, had a toy chest filled with interesting things: a well-stocked Noah’s Ark which looked like it had been carved and painted by a professional, not by Edgar’s father; an entire battalion of tin soldiers; a little wooden train with cars and a caboose which could be hitched or unhitched according to Edgar’s desire; and the one which truly stirred envy in Arthur’s heart, the cream of the crop, was an enormous rabbit with velour skin, stuffed with the softest cotton.

Edgar himself seemed uninterested in his own toys, and downright disdainful of Arthur’s. He glanced at the horse and soldier with weary, dark eyes and then turned to the window, gazing outside with his bare knees knocking against the wall. It didn’t escape Arthur’s notice that Edgar had a proper nursery, with clouds painted on the walls and a rocking horse in the corner; it didn’t escape his notice, either, that while the window was high, made for adults, there was a leather seat beneath it which a child Edgar’s size could easily climb onto in order to peek outside.

None of the windows in Eel Marsh House had seats like that.

“I would walk the causeway,” Edgar declared in his strange, flat voice, staring out at the rain. “My older brothers all did it when they was my age. At night, even.”

“You can’t walk it at night,” said Arthur automatically. He was examining the two wooden lions which had been wedged into Edgar’s ark. Both of them had manes made of badger fur, glued to the wood.

“You can so,” says Edgar. “My brothers did it.”

“But the tide comes up at night.”

Edgar pushed back from the window, his small face dark with fury. He lashed out with his foot to kick the lions out of Arthur’s hands, then remembered they were his own toys and stopped himself with the toe of his unpolished shoe mere centimeters away from Arthur’s fingers.

Unperturbed, Arthur turned his eyes back to the lions and bumped one’s maw against the other’s neck, making them fight.

“Do they share the nursery with you?” Arthur asked. He could see only the hem of Edgar’s short pants, his scabby knees, and his long socks. After a moment, those knees bent and Edgar sunk down to the floor next to Arthur, reaching glumly for a striped beast which Arthur supposed might be a zebra.

“They’re dead,” Edgar said.

Arthur thought of the eroded, lichen-covered headstone he’d discovered the day before, and the inscription which read SON, 1842-1849. He stared down at the wooden lions, his hands temporarily stilled. After a moment, he forced himself to move them again, this time having them chase each other around his bent left leg.

“The death of a child,” said Edgar loftily, “is the most painful thing anyone can endure. But endure it we must  — that’s what my mother says.”

He reached over and tried to pry one of the lions from Arthur’s hand. For a moment, Arthur resisted, his temper flaring. Then he remembered it wasn’t his lion and he relaxed his grip, allowing Edgar to snatch it straight from his fingers.

“How did they die?” Arthur asked. 

Edgar’s face was blank and tired as he maneuvered the lion so that it faced the zebra. Sluggishly, he prodded them together until Arthur realized he was pantomiming a predator on the hunt  — rather poorly, in Arthur’s opinion. As soon as he’d realized this, Edgar grew weary of his game and let both toys slip from his hands to clatter against the floor. He toppled backward gracelessly onto his back and stared up at the nursery ceiling.

After a moment, Arthur joined him. There were no clouds painted on the ceiling. Instead, there was a somewhat gloomy seascape done in pale, cold colors, with the main feature being a white pelican who stood out against the grey expanse of the sea. 

“I’d like to walk the causeway,” said Edgar dreamily. “I’d do it at midnight and I’d walk all the way to Eel Marsh House. And I wouldn’t be afraid at all.”

Arthur shifted, trying to get comfortable against the scratchy carpeting of Edgar’s nursery. He turned his eyes from one corner of the ceiling to the other, noting the tiny seagulls, the grey waves, the blue triangle which was meant to be a distant sailboat, the seashells painted onto a grimy-looking beach.

“Have you seen any ghosts out there?” asked Edgar, changing the subject again.

And Arthur, barely hearing the question, lost in the painted sea, said, “No.”

* * *

At night, he slid sideways off the lumpy new mattress, unable to sleep. His knees hit the floorboards; blindly, he scrabbled under the bed for his horse and soldier, and when he had them in his hands he shuffled to the window, the only source of light inside the attic. 

Standing on his tiptoes, he lined the horse and soldier up along the sill. Outside, he could see the marsh, absorbing a gentle fall of rain as thought that was what it had been designed to do. 

He felt the presence behind him before he noticed her reflection in the window, her wasted face next to his own. Her reflection seemed strangely faded, like it was nothing more than an echo trapped in the glass.

And she wasn’t a ghost. Arthur knew that much. He knew it because when she laid her hand on his shoulder, he could feel it. Her hand had weight; her fingers brushed against his neck and he could the dry, paper-like texture of her skin. He could feel her nails digging into his thin shoulder, the pain blunted by the layer of cloth between him. His nightshirt was the only thing saving him from a nasty cut.

He kept his eyes on the window. He forced himself to focus on the marsh outside instead of the reflection of the woman behind him. He forced himself to breathe, each expansion and deflation of his lungs abbreviated, the air he took in feeling arctic and tinged with frost.

Her other hand appeared in his line of sight. His eyes were glued to it; he didn’t turn his head, but he tracked her as she reached past him, past his shoulder, past his face  — and set her hand down on his wooden soldier.

She lifted it.

She set it down.

She lifted it again.

She was making it gallop, Arthur realized.

She was playing with him.

He had a friend.

* * *

The first thing he noticed the next morning was that heat had settled into the attic like a dense fog. His nightshirt clung to him, soaked through with sweat; his blankets were piled onto the floor, where he had kicked them at some point during the night. His hair was stuck to his forehead, curling and damp from the humidity.

The second thing he noticed was that the round window next to his bed was covered in frost. On the sill, his horse and soldier were gleaming in the morning light. When Arthur touched them, he found out why: they were coated in ice.

He left them there. He retrieved his play clothes from the cupboard Mother had unearthed their first day here and carried them carefully down the narrow steps; he’d dress downstairs, where it was cooler.

* * *

_ The death of a child, _ Edgar had said. 

Arthur stood in the graveyard with his palms flat against the stone which read SON. Wild ferns tickled his calves, but he did not move to brush them away. The muggy heat from his room had followed him here, and he could feel sweat gathering beneath his collar and trickling down his neck.

Edgar had never said how his brothers died. And Arthur would never know how this nameless boy died, either. He traced the boy’s death date and wondered if it mattered. There were so many ways to die, weren’t there, and all of them terrible in his eyes. He could think of no good way to go. 

Maybe an explosion, he mused. Something fast and loud and painless. And there would be no body afterward; Arthur suspected perhaps people who died were still conscious for a while after their bodies stopped working, and he figured it would be better to have no body at all than to be trapped inside one as maggots chewed their way inside. 

The worst thing anyone must endure.

He pulled his hands back from the stone with difficulty, his elbows refusing to bend, his palms feeling almost as though they’d been glued in place. For a moment longer, he stared at the grave and tried to decipher the emotions surging through him. Loneliness, he knew that one  — and the other one he suspected was sorrow for the nameless boy, a sorrow so deep it circled back around to himself. 

Mother had asked him if he’d like to go visit Edgar again. She’d asked it at breakfast this morning, over a lukewarm pot of tea and cold corned beef hash. Arthur had looked beseechingly at Father, but Father had been utterly engrossed in the morning’s newspaper and a plate of toast.

So Arthur had simply said, “No.”

After a beat of silence (he’d surprised her, he knew), Mother had put on a bright smile and said, “Very well. What about your other little playmates? Would you like to see them?”

“I don’t have any,” said Arthur.

“But surely you do,” said Mother. “What about those children who were playing outside Edgar’s house?”

Arthur only shrugged. He hadn’t been introduced to them; they weren’t Edgar’s friends. But Mother would fret if he didn’t say something to comfort her, so he put some firmness into his voice and said, “I want to play here.”

For a moment, Mother didn’t answer. Arthur clacked his fork loudly against his plate.

“I want to explore the woods,” he said. “And Edgar doesn’t like it here. He said the marsh frightens him.”

Edgar had said no such thing, but Mother accepted it. She glanced out the window with a pensive look, biting her lip, hugging herself for just a moment. Then she’d turned back to Arthur, trying to smooth out the creases in her brow, and said,

“More milk, darling?”

And now Arthur was here, alone in the woods on an unbearably hot day, with mist soaking through his clothes gradually and unstoppably. He moved through the graveyard carefully, stomping down cordgrass to beat out a path. Most of the stones weren’t legible anymore, but there were a few he could almost make out.

One said  _ Infant Harkness,  _ or perhaps  _ Infant Hartnell,  _ or something of the sort.

Another said  _ Beloved Daughter. _

And this one said  _ Sister, _ and that one said  _ Brother, _ and that one said  _ Infant Son. _ And this one, in the corner of the graveyard where the border dissolved into trees, bore only an age:  _ 9 mo., 3 dy. _

He thought of the woman in his bedroom last night and found himself closing his eyes, imagining each of the dead children walking to him from the trees. They’d make good playmates. They’d be so eager to feel alive again they’d probably let Arthur come up with all the games.

He’d like to join them. There was a peculiar temptation inherent to the concept of death: he’d like to be a ghost and walk through walls and be invisible when he wanted to be. He’d like to stay seven years old forever and never go to school or need to sleep.

He opened his eyes.

He smiled.

The woman on the edge of the graveyard smiled back.

* * *

When she joined him in the attic again that night, things were different, and Arthur wasn’t sure how. He could hear her voice coming to him like wind through the trees, but the words didn’t quite match up to her lips. It was like something he couldn’t see was crouched behind her and speaking in a whispery voice while the woman moved her lips, trying to keep up.

_ Let’s play, _ she said, and Arthur eyed his horse and soldier, both of them still cold to the touch.

“Play what?” he asked.

The woman smiled. Her gums were black and rotten.

_ Let’s play doctor, _ she said.

Arthur had never played doctor before  — but he was a sharp boy and a fast learner. She put his hands against his shoulders and lay him down on his lumpy, straw-stuffed mattress, hitching his nightshirt up as he went. By the time his back hit the blankets, he was nude, and the air was cold against his skin. 

And then she touched him, her gnarled fingers trailing down his chest and dipping into his navel, making Arthur’s spine spasm with discomfort. He looked up at her and wished he didn’t have to see that dried-up domino mask around her melted eyes. He turned his gaze to the window, where his horse and soldier had become dark silhouettes on the wrong side of the moonlight.

“What are you doing?” he asked  — quietly, so Mother and Father wouldn’t hear his voice through the floorboards or drifting down the stairs.

_ A doctor must examine his patients, _ said the woman in black. She leaned down, bringing her twisted lips against Arthur’s neck, and he could feel himself tensing as he squeezed his eyes shut. The smell of her pushed down his throat, into his nose, into his lungs. 

He almost didn’t feel it when her dry palm brushed against his cock. He flinched; he felt himself twitch beneath her hand. His eyes were wide now, and he didn’t remember opening them.

“I don’t want to play anymore,” he said. He wasn’t trying to be quiet anymore, but somehow his voice came out trembling and almost inaudible.

_ Of course you do, _ said the woman in black.  _ All children want to play.  _

“But it hurts,” said Arthur  — and it did, her grip on him too tight, her hand too dry, her movements sharp and fast and painful. The friction was too much to bear.

And then suddenly it wasn’t.

Suddenly, pleasure snaked up through his body and blinded him, replacing his vision with white light and making his nerves stand up on end.

Like an explosion.

* * *

Their vacation at Eel Marsh House ended a week after it began. Arthur’s mother bundled him up for the long, cold ride back to the train station. She was folding the blanket over his lap and trying to make eye contact with him when she noticed something missing.

“Your toys,” she said.

Arthur stared past her, his gaze solemn and strangely adult, fixed on the line where the lawn met the trees.

“Arthur,” said Mother, clasping his hands, “where are your toys? Did you leave them in the attic?”

He said nothing. After a long moment, he shrugged his shoulders and shook his head, dislodging his hands from her grip.

“I don’t need them anymore,” he said. 

At the front of the cart, overhearing their conversation, Father gave an approving snort and said, “It’s about time, really. He’s getting too old for games.”

Mother was less sure. She stooped down and brushed back the hair from Arthur’s forehead. He met her eyes coldly, appraisingly, and looked away again.

“He’s growing up,” said Mother proudly, uncertainly. 

She kissed his forehead.

His skin was cold.

“Let’s go, then,” Father said, and as Mother joined him in the cart and the horse led them all away from Eel Marsh House, Arthur’s eyes tracked up to the attic, where his horse and soldier were still visible in the window.

_ So many ways to die, _ he thought, but he couldn’t trace that sentiment back to his origin. Something had changed him here, something he could no longer remember. There was a woman, he thought  — or a child his age  — or a ghost, a hallucination, and it had changed him so that toys no longer seemed important, so that games seemed distasteful in the extreme.

He was no longer a child, he reflected, and he didn’t know how or why.


End file.
